Special Report: Quantum Cryptography Arrives

One company introduces the world's first commercial quantum cryptography system and another prepares to unveil a secondbut the government may be ahead of the game.
 Cover Story: The Future of Technology

Contents

Long hailed as the future of electronic security, quantum cryptography has arrived. As Swiss company id Quantique introduces a commercial quantum cryptography system and an American company, MagiQ Technologies, plans to unveil a second, at least one of the field's leading researchers believes the technology is already being used to send data in the nation's capital.

Quantum cryptography is the ultimate in ciphers. Drawing on the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanicsthe physics associated with very small particlesit allows two people to exchange encryption keys over a public network, use those keys to encode their correspondence, and know that the correspondence is completely secure. In theory, if you encode an e-mail message, a telephone call, or a financial transaction using quantum techniques, the content will be hidden from the eyes of interlopers not only for the moment, but for eternity.

Chris Fuchs, a Bell Labs scientist who's been at the forefront of quantum research for the past decade, is convinced the government has already put this impenetrable padlock on much of the top-secret correspondence it sends across Washington.

Attending a recent meeting at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., Fuchs ran into a researcher who had long worked at the nearby Maryland lab that, along with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, handles all of the government's quantum cryptography work. Over the years, this government scientist had spent many hours discussing his work with Fuchs. But this time, when asked about his latest efforts, the researcher refused to utter a word.

"He used to be able to talk openly about this stuff, and he just wouldn't say anything," says Fuchs, who studied with Gilles Brassard, one of the fathers of quantum cryptography, and worked on quantum projects at Los Alamos before moving to Bell Labs. "I'm sure that the government is already using quantum cryptography systems for real applications."

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